Shimmer Blog

You know what would be neat? If everyone in the science fiction and fantasy world voted in the Hugo awards. If everyone read widely and discussed what they loved. If all the voices were heard, not just the loudest. A healthy ecosystem is one that’s teeming with millions of kinds of life; let’s find ways to include more people.

If you can afford a supporting membership to WorldCon, I strongly encourage you to buy one. It’s $40. A supporting membership gives you the right to vote in this year’s Hugos — and the right to nominate in next year’s.

If you can’t afford a supporting membership… Mary Robinette Kowal is offering to pay for a supporting membership to WorldCon for ten people who cannot afford it.

This is a splendid idea. Shimmer’s happy to join Mary. We’ll match her offer: ten memberships for people who can’t otherwise afford one. Email beth@shimmerzine.com with your name, phone number (just as backup in case your email doesn’t work), and a paragraph telling me a little bit about yourself and why you’d like a supporting membership. I expect to get more than ten people interested, so will ultimately choose at random.

Please help us spread the word. Tell a friend, tell your family, tell your community members. Reach out and help us make the table bigger.

And while you’re reaching out? Talk to them about science fiction and fantasy. What are you watching or reading that’s awesome? What are you creating?

I think my favorite thing I read this week was Ishq, by Usman Malik, a reprint in this month’s Nightmare. It’s a story about family and hope and death, and it’s wonderful and terrible.

Comments on this post will be heavily moderated. Don’t be a dick.

Edited to add: vote for whatever works you want; that decision is entirely up to you, and you don’t owe Shimmer (or me!) anything.

Tell us about your first fiction sale; what was that like? Did you spend the money on anything special?

I think my first sale was in late 2009 or early 2010 to Bards & Sages Quarterly. I know my first professional sale was in 2011 to Daily Science Fiction, and in both cases, I’m certain I spent the money on books.

You started publishing in 2011, but how long have you actually been writing?

Here is where I say ever since I was very young and everyone can roll their eyes, but I think most writers answer that question the same way because it’s true. I remember writing books in third grade and trying to sell them to my friends. Of course my friends had no money, but still.

I wrote tons of poetry and vignettes over the years and tried writing novels (including a mystery and an epic fantasy), but never finished the latter. In 2009, I started writing flash fiction, something which I find almost next to impossible to write now, and completed my first novel, a novel that will never see the light of day because it’s the most dreadful thing ever.

Do you consider your writing dark fantasy, horror, or does it exist in that place that simply is “speculative fiction”?

I tend to think of my work as speculative fiction. It’s quite a bit like cake — sometimes I cover it in science fiction frosting, other times I reach for the contemporary fantasy flour, and still other times, I spice it with the dark and horrific or weird.

You write and you also edit; you write short stories and also novels. Does one balance the other? Are they ever in conflict? Is it all just one beautiful, chaotic ball of creativity?

Editing occupies a very different headspace than writing, and on the plus side, editing work by other authors has strengthened my ability to edit my own work. Most of the time, juggling both editing and writing isn’t a problem, unless I’m working against simultaneous deadlines. Then it becomes a bit tricky because it’s hard for me to quickly flip from creative brain to analytical pick apart the sentences until they bleed brain.

Talk to us about process a little. Do you outline? Do you just write forward from a general idea of how a piece will go?

I used to get an idea, sit in front of the computer, and start writing. Now, though, I spend time thinking about my stories first. I jot ideas in a notebook, make notes on themes and sketch loose outlines, and start writing in longhand. I’ve written quite a few stories against deadlines recently and have found that more time spent thinking often results in a cleaner first draft.

How did you go about choosing the stories that would become your debut collection, Sing Me Your Scars?

Here is where I confess my love for spreadsheets. I made one with columns for everything from theme to grammatical tense to genre to word count, then I added in those details for each story I was considering. Once I came up with a likely table of contents, I put all the stories in a word document.

That first draft had several more reprints, but as I read it through, some didn’t seem to fit as well as others, so I cut here and there, making adjustments to my spreadsheet as well to keep track of everything. I hope that the end result is cohesive and enjoyable, but my work is done and it belongs to the readers now.

Do you have a favorite story in the collection?

That’s a hard one to answer because many of them mean different things. “Like Origami in Water” was my first professional sale so it holds a special place in my heart, and both “Melancholia in Bloom” and “Glass Boxes and Clockwork Gods” were influenced by my grandmother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease. But I’m also very fond of the title story as it’s an homage to Mary Shelley.

What can you tell us about your novel, Paper Tigers, coming later this year from Dark House Press?

Paper Tigers is about a disfigured young woman and an old photo album she finds at a thrift store. It’s partly a haunted house story and partly a ghost story, but the ghosts are both external and internal. It’s very different from my first novel, Ink, and closer, I think, in flavor to my short fiction.

Favorite authors — both in and out of field in which you write? Do you think any one has overly influenced your work?

I’m certain they’ve all influenced my work in one form or another, but probably (hopefully) in more subtle than overt ways. And I know I’m missing names on both lists, names that I’ll remember as soon as I send these answers!

Picture it: you’re alone on the Nostromo…or are you? What weapon would you want if you were going up against an Alien? Flame thrower? Harpoon gun? Power loader?

I’m going to go with the flame thrower. It would keep me from having to get up close and personal with the Alien. Then again, the Alien is pretty tricksy. Look at what happened to poor Dallas in the air duct. Maybe I should pick the power loader instead.

Tell us about a great book you read recently.

The Wilds by Julia Elliott. It’s a short fiction collection that’s hard to classify. It’s literary, it’s genre, it’s dark and fantastical and the imagery is amazing. Like this:

“On a rancid summer dog day, when you’re dirty and scrawny and ugly and poor, when your fingernails sting from too much biting, when the kitchen stinks of unclean plates, when there’s nowhere to go, when punishment awaits you, when swarms of gnats flicker beyond bright windows, when heat sinks your mind into the syrupy filth of boredom…”

I want to marry that passage. It’s incredibly evocative. Regardless of what genre you’d shelve this collection under, I highly recommend it.

How do you take your coffee?

Preferably with soymilk and two packets of Truvia, but if milk and sugar are the only things available, I’ll make do. If the zombie apocalypse ever happens, I’m pretty sure it will be the lack of coffee that does me in. Then again, I’d make sure to add instant coffee and a spoon to one of my supply runs. Desperate times, desperate measures…

Ferrett appeared in Shimmer #13 with a story involving, of all things, a unicorn. And a magical mirror. He’s always been turning tropes on their head, and does so again in his debut novel from Angry Robot, Flex.

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Tell us how and where Flex began for you.

True fact: When I sent this to Seanan McGuire to see if she’d blurb it, she called me up and asked, “So how much Mage: the Ascension did you play before you came up with this?” And I said, “Ya got me.”

But yes, my group was roleplaying, and someone joked about the idea of brewing magical drugs. I was hugely into Breaking Bad at the time, and I thought, “Wow, how much weirder would that be if it wasn’t just drug dealers, but magical drug dealers?” So the wheels started turning.

But the problem was that I generally don’t like magic. It’s got what I call “Doctor Strange syndrome” – what can’t Doctor Strange do? What are his limitations? All the guy has to do is wave his hands and chant about Agamotto and he can turn back time, he can erase the world’s memories, he teleport to other dimensions. And that’s fun for a while, but eventually you start struggling to find challenges that the audience can understand – it’s more fun if the audience knows when the hero’s about to crack.

So I thought a lot about what I thought magical drugs could do that no other drug could, and decided to explore the ramifications of Harry Potter’s luck potion. Seriously, why is anyone learning any other kind of magic? I know it’s difficult, but if you devote your life to brewing up batches of Felix Felicis, what else do you need to do? So I thought, “Well, if you get good luck for a while… you must get bad luck.” And then I started tying that into Unknown Armies’ obsession-based magic system, and the next thing you know I had a guy who was so devoted to getting his insurance paperwork right that he’s become this magical champion of the insurance company.

“That guy seems the least qualified person to make drugs,” said I, and a story was born.

Does Flex have a soundtrack? (If not, why not! Get cracking!)

It does! Sorta. I listen to one song over and over again when I write – it’s how I keep centered on the heart of the novel. When I’m stuck for what to do next, I just listen to The Song and everything unravels.

In this case? The Talking Heads’ “Burning Down The House.” (The live version off of Stop Making Sense.)

Interestingly, Stephen King lied to me. If you read Christine or any of his other early novels, you’d think it’d be super-easy to quote lyrics in your book. But these days you have to fill out forms and go through ASCAP, and it costs a fortune. I’m told by the publishers that Fleetwood Mac once wanted $4,000 to quote lyrics. That’s more than many advances, man. So you won’t find the lyrics quoted in the book, though I may scribble them in there at a signing if you ask me nicely.

Flex plays with a lot of tropes, but is notable for its use of video games, and their environments–literally plunging characters into the midst of games most SFF readers should be familiar with. If you could be thrust into any game, which would you choose?

I’d actually go with Mass Effect. I love Bioware games, but Dragon Age is such a crapsack world. Between mages and demon infestations, I would not want to go there. Mass Effect has the Reapers, natch, but large segments of it look pretty nice. And given that I’d rather chat than fight, there’s a lot of talking to be done.

(Fun fact: In any RPG, I’m the guy maxing out his speaking skills. If I can talk my way out of the final battle – *cough cough* Fallout *cough* – then I automatically love the game.

Paul’s magic stems from paperwork; where does your magic come from?

I think the reason I had a magic system based on obsession is because really, obsession is my writing superpower. I wasn’t the most talented writer in my Clarion class; I wasn’t the most charming. But I think I was the most dedicated, and so when Neil Gaiman told me that I wasn’t good enough yet and “You just have to write,” well, dammit, I wrote. Every day. Sick or well. Psychologically healthy, or in the throes of seasonal depression. I honed my knife as best I could, and now if Flex isn’t good enough, I’ll keep writing more.

The theme keeps turning up in my stories, though. “The Sturdy Bookshelves of Pawel Oliszewski” is about obsession-based magic. And my story for Shimmer, “A Window, Clear As A Mirror” is entirely about a man who can’t let go. So I kind of deal with that a lot.

Speaking of Magic, you work for Star City Games — what is your favorite Magic the Gathering card (or set) and why?

Magic has repeatedly disappointed me by failing to produce a viable ferret. Joven’s Ferrets and Repopulate? NOT GOOD ENOUGH, WIZARDS OF THE COAST.

That said, my favorite card is still probably Pernicious Deed. It’s in my favorite colors (black and green), it is a distinct Rattlesnake card in multiplayer to warn people off elsewhere, and it’s super-fun. For me. Not you. But hey, who wanted you to have a good time?

You attended both Viable Paradise and Clarion; did one workshop teach you something the other didn’t? How do you think both have changed your writing?

Clarion was what got my eyes pried open. My six weeks at that writer-intensive broke me down and reforged me, but the number-one lesson is that I Was Not Shooting High Enough. I thought my stories were pretty good, going into Clarion, and I came out thinking my stories were pretty good; the difference was that I had realized that pretty good wasn’t enough.

I had to knock the reader so far on her ass that she’d have to crawl back to the page.

So Clarion was where I really went, “Wow, you’ve got a lot of lazy habits that you thought you could get away with,” but man, I could not. If there’s anything you’re aware of in your story that’s not polished to a diamond-like shine, fix that. Because your story’s going to fall short in a hundred other areas that you’re not good enough to even see yet, so the smartest thing you can do is to amplify the stuff you know is good.

And if Clarion got me thinking about the guts of a story, Viable Paradise got me working on my prose.

Here’s a hint if you ever go to Viable Paradise: Ask Teresa Nielsen-Hayden to do her trick. She’ll say she doesn’t know what that trick is. “Edit me,” you tell her.

And she will sit down with your story, and begin to edit it. She will cross out whole sentences. She will eviscerate your words. She will show you just how flabby and redundant and awful your prose is, and eventually what’s left will be the barest minimum of words – so few you won’t be able to believe what’s left standing. And you’ll see how much quicker and bolder your story reads, and you’ll be enlightened.

Tell us about a fabulous book you recently finished reading.

I am currently reading Jo Walton’s The Just City, which is a fantastic hook: the Greek Gods, who are still alive today, have recreated Plato’s Republic, using everyone who ever prayed to Athene that it existed. It’s an amazing thought experiment, and considering that I’ve loved everything Jo’s written, I’m positive I’ll love it in all of its weirdness. She’s amazing. I’m so stoked every day to sit in my bathtub and read it.

What’s next for you? When can we expect FLUX?

I’m finishing up a new draft of Flux as we speak (literally, I’m switching back to answer a question between each chapter), and while I have no absolute date, I expect it’ll be out sometime in 2016. I’m also working on an as-yet-untitled science-fiction manuscript about a boy coming of age in the greatest restaurant in the universe – yes, yes, make your Douglas Adams joke now – and I have my sci-fi dystopia The Upterlife out on submission from my agent. So I’ve got lots coming up.

But seriously. Buy my book now, or I might not get to publish all these others!

Silvia Moreno-Garcia has appeared in Shimmer three times and this winter, her debut novel, Signal to Noise arrives. Silvia was awesome enough to sit down with us to talk about books, Easy Bake Ovens, and the wonder that is “Take on Me” by a-ha.

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Tell us how and when Signal to Noise began for you.

Not sure when. I’m terrible with dates. Probably three years ago. It started only with one scene, which is how I start everything. Adult Meche and Sebastian see each other across the street and it is raining. I know it sounds rather prosaic but I thought it was a very weighty moment and it lingered in my head. The rest of the book was an attempt to answer what they were doing there.Let’s get the most obvious question out of the way first: does Signal to Noise have a mix tape? soundtrack? Do we have to wear our Vans to listen to it?

Yeah, it always jumped back and forth in time. I think originally I was attempting to write a Young Adult novel but that didn’t work out. I don’t think I know what YA means. Or I’m not good with categories.

Why Mexico City?

Write what you know, I say.You write both short stories and novels; does one appeal to you more than the other?

I would rather write shorter than longer. I have a hard time focusing on a single project. I hate the fact that the 50,000 word novel is not so popular these days. I have a lot of old books which clock at around that point. I’m also not a series person. I cannot imagine reading book 9 of the 15 volume series A Very European Medieval Imaginary Land, much less writing it. With that said I write whatever length works best.If we were to come visit you in British Colombia, what’s the most 80s place you could take us to?

The Movieland Arcade on Granville. It has only machines from the 80s and it feels like a dingy time capsule that was left behind, forgotten, between the shiny new glass buildings of Vancouver. This is also the home of the last of the 8mm peep shows. Pretty much the last place in North America where you can throw a quarter and see a few minutes of vintage, celluloid pornography. It’s one of my favourite places in Vancouver, though I’m sure they’ll bulldoze it and build a giant condo tower on top one day or the other. That’s what happens here.If Meche had to choose between the hair of anyone from the Thompson Twins, Whitney “How Will I Know” Houston, or Mike Score of Flock of Seagulls, who would she style herself after?

She’s probably too cool to imitate any popular hairstyles of the time period.

What would a Signal to Noise music video look like? Would it be styled like “Take On Me,” or maybe “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” or maybe even “How Will I Know.”

Good God. Maybe “Take On Me,” just because it’s the most awesome music video ever? But my memo to the artist when they asked about inspiration for the cover said to sit back and listen to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and Duncan Dhu’s “En Algun Lugar,” so I guess I had “Total” on my head.Favorite movies from the 80s, go.

Too many to name. Many did not age well though I was watching the 1980s version of Flash Gordon with my children the other night and they had a lot of fun. More super hero movies need a Queen-like soundtrack. I guarantee you the shitty Transformers franchise would benefit greatly if you played it with no dialogue, only Queen songs playing. It might become avant garde, even.You have published and written a good many Lovecraft-themed stories and anthologies. What is it about Lovecraft that interests you, and does that influence your own work?

It varies. Right now his biological determinism but it’s not a constant state of affairs.Tell us about a fabulous book you’ve read recently.

I’m not a good person to make recommendations. I liked Kraken Bake by Karen Dudley, which is the second book in a funny series set in Ancient Greece where gods and magical creatures are real. I call it Princess Bride meets Greek Mythology.What do you have against Easy Bake Ovens? Will this hostility be resolved in a Signal to Noise sequel? If not, what’s next for you?

I can guarantee there will never be a Signal to Noise sequel. I hope we can sell Young Blood, my novel with Mexican vampire drug dealers. But that’s for my agent to figure out. I was working on a 1920s novel set in the Mexican northern border but I got to the point where I hate it and kicked it away to start work on something new that is called, for now, The Beautiful Ones, and takes place in a sort of alternate Belle Epoque.

As a postscript, I owned an Easy Bake Oven. It was the best toy a child can have. Now they make them with some kind of special lightbulb that takes forever to cook the cake, for safety reasons. But I say live a little.

People often ask me, “what makes a story Shimmery,” and it’s not always easily answered — sometimes, you don’t know a story is Shimmery until you hit the end, and you realize there is a change inside you.

Sometimes, it’s more easily answered, as the shimmer is distinct from the point of entry. A confident voice that knows where it’s going from the first line, even if I, as a reader, don’t know. The immediate delivery of an image that is unusual, arresting; an image that makes you pause and want to see more. The stories in Shimmer #23 accomplish both things for me as editor and reader both.

Something moves in the half dark two gas lamps ahead of me.

Gas lamps! Something? In the half dark? I’m already intrigued, even if we don’t yet know what the something is. Does our narrator know? Indeed she knows, and will show us everything soon.

Child’s mistress was out when the scentless woman entered the shop and laid a strip of severed cloth upon the counter.

A scentless woman, a severed cloth. A character named Child? Where is this going? There are a few things to unpack, beautiful threads that foreshadow much to come.

When I think oil rig, I think big metal Viking onslaught in the night.

Immediate hook — pounding metal music exploding through a winter night. Hammer of the gods! Ships to new lands! You are on that ship, holding on.

Things used to be pure inside me.

How Shimmery is that opening line? So Shimmery. Seven words that convey a huge image, a big idea the story will unpack piece by piece. What things, why are they no longer pure, what changed?

Something inside you may change as you read this quartet of stories. My thanks to Sarah Pinsker and Madison Bell for their help in proofing the Haitian Creole herein.

Shimmer went digital this year, and published twenty-eight stories! Of those, twenty-four authors were new to Shimmer, and of those, I believe three authors made their debuts with us. Ann VanderMeer guest edited issue #18 for us; when we went digital with issue #19, we welcomed Robert N. Lee as our creative director. Laura Blackwell joined us as a copy editor, while Sandro Castelli remained as art director.

Overwhelmingly, Shimmer was well received. Lois Tilton of Locus Magazine recommended “A Whisper in the Weld,” “Cantor’s Dragon,” and “The Earth and Everything Under,” and readers seemed to love…everything? What a delight to see stories from Seth Dickinson, Vajra Chandrasekera, Kelly Sandoval, and Alix E. Harrow blow up in social media circles.

Early estimates say that Shimmer badgers wrangled 4500 submissions over the course of 2014. And who are those Shimmer badgers anyhow? A huge shout out to them, because we couldn’t do anything without their paws: Sophie Wereley, Joy Marchand, Nicola Belte, Pam Wallace, and Stacey Janssen. Keffy Kehrli, Cory Skerry, and Gra Linnaea also saw us through 2014, some more dragon than badger.

We are looking ahead to 2015, and whatever it may bring — so far, January 1st brings a kick-ass issue filled with four more new-to-Shimmer authors. Want to be one of those? We reopen to submissions on January 12th.

Out They Come, by Alex Dally MacFarlane
Love in the Time of Vivisection, by Sunny Moraine

And Shimmer badgers?

Our Nicola Belte got a mention, with her story, “B,” from The Journal of Unlikely Entomology #5!

Both issues of Shimmer are available in our back issues if you missed out the first time around. Thanks, as always, to Ellen Datlow for the time and work she gives to this genre; what an amazing number of things she reads every year!

This has been one of the most challenging years I’ve ever experienced, personally and professionally. 2014 has contained losses — some we expected and some we never saw coming. 2014 has contained reams of bad news dropped upon, oh look, reams of bad news.

I wonder: was the world always like this and we just never knew, but now we can’t not know, because we are constantly connected to a world larger than our neighborhoods; we are global now, “living in the future” we say, watching as events half the world away impact our daily lives.

We carry the world in our pockets — the news is always there, sought or not. No stumbling out to a newspaper box to get the headlines, they’re already stacked in your phone. The news is no longer a sound bite on television — you can watch in real time as life, terrible and glorious life, unfolds in streets across the world. And that world is huge and often terrible, and overwhelming.

Time and again, because of that, I come back to short fiction.

A short story allows me to narrow my focus and slow my breath — I did this as a kid in school, too, though only in looking back did I realize it for what it was. For a few precious pages, I don’t have to think about what is happening anywhere else; for half an hour, I can sink into a wholly new world — or a hidden aspect of our own — and vanish.

If you find yourself needing to pause and take a breath, I hope these four stories allow that. They explore loss and recovery in equal measure–all the thistles and dandelions growing up through Isa bloomed at once, out of season, in a riotous bouquet. These four stories close out an amazing Shimmer year, which means our printed annual is on the horizon. These four stories encompass a hope that we carry on the face of strange doings; that we keep taking the next step, even if we don’t know exactly where it leads.

As 2014 winds down, be excellent to each other, and remember to breathe.

E. Catherine Tobler’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her first novel, Rings of Anubis, is now available. Follow her on Twitter @ECthetwit or her website, http://www.ecatherine.com.